Four days and three nights passed before Cadmus’ house went quiet. Out of desperation, Flint had resorted to Vampirising his fellow rats, as he waited for his chance to flee the Plenipotentiary’s lair. It was shoddy cuisine, but desperation made the blood taste much better than it actually did.

Even though the place had fallen silent, Flint was more than a little frightened that Cadmus was still present and waiting for him to attempt an escape. If Cadmus was a master of one thing, it was absolute stillness. Flint had never been more afraid in his life, truth be told, and that fright conflicted with his impulse to flee immediately. He fought the urge, however, knowing that it was all too likely that Cadmus was waiting silently for Flint to reveal himself so that he could sacrifice the young vagabond Vampire to his Harming Tree.

He could sense the sun sinking beyond the mouldy stone walls of his dungeon hide-out and decided to give the silence one that night and the following day before he attempted to spirit himself away from the hidden keep. After draining another rat, Flint slept, curled up in amongst his living brothers, but still shivering from cold and trepidation.

For most Vampires, patience was something that came with the territory of immortality. Waiting for anything was like blinking your eyes in the scheme of things. It all passed so quickly, the endlessness and variety.

For Flint, however, patience had always run thin. Although he almost always was of a mind to shrug off the world and walk his own vagrant path, waiting for anything he wanted or enduring any situation that was not ideal to his whims of the moment were both nigh untenable, especially if he did not have anything else to busy his mind whilst forced to exercise a virtue that simply was not part of his make-up.

Flint opened one beady rat eye and glared at his brothers, who all seemed content in the deep crevice shared by the colony. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic and irritable. It had been 24 hours and, still, the keep was silent as death. Raising his nose, Flint sniffed the stagnant air, and caught no scent of the Dark Child of Night. Cadmus had to be gone. This could be Flint’s only chance to escape the horrors of his killing ground.

Rising from the dank floor, Flint stretched, emerging from the ancient gash in the stone wall. Instantly, he became his human form once more, immediately crouching in a defensive position. You just could not be too careful with a creature like Cadmus Pariah. His powers were boggling, and Flint felt he had been nothing more than lucky to have escaped the Plenipotentiary’s lethal wrath for this long.